Transcript

Journalist [archival]: Swats team moved in as students and teachers sheltered in classrooms.

Donald Trump [archival]: Your concept and your idea about…it's called concealed carry, teachers and coaches, if the coach had a firearm he wouldn't have had to run, he would have shot and that would have been the end of it.

Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association [archival]: To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.

Annabelle Quince: Despite the thousands of Americans who die each year from gun violence, whether via suicide, homicide or one of the mass shootings, guns continue to hold a special place in American society and culture.

No one knows exactly how many guns there are in America; but what we do know is that the industry that produces the guns is a billion-dollar business and it's one that's been around for a very long time.

Hello, this is Rear Vision on RN, I'm Annabelle Quince.

The story of America's gun industry is the story of America itself, and to understand it you must go back to the American Revolution of independence and the 13 colonies that defeated Great Britain. Brian DeLay is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California in Berkeley.

Brian DeLay: There were gun manufacturers in the 13 colonies prior to the American Revolution, but there weren't very many, and they generally worked in very small shops, often alone or maybe with a one apprentice. And so gun making was a very simplistic enterprise in colonial North America, sometimes very fine guns could be produced but never in quantity, and that was really the huge difference between the colonies and Europe where the vast majority of the world's firearms were made in the 18th century.

Annabelle Quince: If there were no major arms manufacturers in the American Colonies, how were they able to defeat Great Britain in the American war of independence?

Brian DeLay: The truth is that the colonies were totally unprepared to fight a war, certainly a war against the most powerful empire in the world at the time. So in order to make this possible they had to embark initially on this really ambitious, complicated international effort to buy guns from Europe, and that allowed the rebellion in the first year, year and a half to enjoy some victories and actually launch into something that seemed like a full-flown rebellion.

But by as early as the winter of 1776 or a mere six months or so after the Declaration of Independence was issued, it was becoming clear that Britain was discovering how to disrupt those markets and how to make sure that the colonists would not in fact get the gunpowder and the guns that they needed to sustain the fight. And so ironically what enables the colonists to prevail was the decision made in France primarily but also in Spain and the Netherlands to secretly arm the colonists as a way to hurt Great Britain.

Annabelle Quince: The revolution, as we know, succussed, and the new United States of America was determined never again to rely on others for arms, and set about creating its own gun manufacturing industry.

Brian DeLay: The government immediately after the revolution, understanding of course how difficult it was to get adequate fire power in order to defend itself against Great Britain, was determined to try to solve that problem and to make the newly United States self-sufficient in firearms and in gunpowder. And it was a really difficult job because they were so far behind the major European powers.

They establish very early on, in the 1790s they establish two different entities, two different manufactories where government employees would try to produce weapons for state purposes, so these manufacturers were at Springfield and Connecticut and Harpers Ferry in the south. So on the one hand they tried to replicate what the British and the French and the Spanish had done and that is to have government arsenals where these arms are produced, but they also believed that in the long-term the answer would have to involve a significant private component. And so the young government decided to issue contracts to anybody who said they were in a position to mass-produce firearms, and that really is the beginning of the domestic firearms industry in the United States.

Pamela Haag: The gun industry, which in many respects created an eventual gun culture, didn't emerge because of the individual civilian consumer or the settler or the cowboy or pioneer, it really began very much as an effort by the US government to find a way to manufacture guns efficiently and in sufficient quantity to meet its needs.

Annabelle Quince: Historian Pamela Haag is the author of The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture.

Pamela Haag: There was a Springfield armoury where innovation and gun technology was really developed, and that armoury also became kind of an incubator for technology, for gun private entrepreneurs. And Eli Whitney, who was one of the pioneers in this area, borrowed much of the technology from the armouries but then that responded to a request put out by the government for gunsmiths who can make guns, and he audaciously said, 'I'm going to try to use machines moved by water to produce a vaster quantity of guns than any gunsmith individually could produce.'

So the government sought gunsmiths to make guns and the ambitious first generation of gun industrialists responded by saying, well, we're going to make 12,000 when a gunsmiths could make 1,000. So in the very late 1700s and early 1800s, there was some fluidity between technologies that the government was developing and gun technologies that private individuals were developing. But really the gun industry began by individuals who were ambitious and who responded to the need for the US government and their call for contracts and for gunsmiths to make guns.

Annabelle Quince: During the early part of the 1800s America was involved in a series of conflicts; did these increase the government's need for guns?

Brian DeLay: That's absolutely the truth. So the war of 1812, the Mexican-American war in 1846 to 1848, and then the constant series of conflicts with native peoples throughout the 19th century, all of these military enterprises created this kind of perpetual need and demand that was met by an increasingly robust and sophisticated arms industry in the United States. So throughout the century…and of course this continues most especially with the American Civil War which really supercharges the domestic arms industry, but this really takes a long time, this is a decades-long project to get the United States arms industry up to the point where it is even a second or third rate arms producer. And that probably begins to be achieved by the 1830s, 1840s.

And by the 1850s there are some iconic companies that are still in existence today that were producing arms that were of interest to people all around the world and the US arms industry by the 1850s was really becoming a first rate arms manufacturer, and even some of its processes, the so-called American system which involved interchangeable parts and mechanised production, these kinds of processes were being taken up by some of the great arms makers in the world, including in the UK.

Pamela Haag: Really in the years before and after the civil war, in the very infancy of the gun industry, when Samuel Colt was getting going in the 1850s, late 1840s, the contracts that really kept the American gun industry lies were largely international. This was true for Winchester, it was true for Samuel Colt, and it was most definitely true for the Remington family, which was particularly ambitious in getting international contracts.

So when Americans and others think about the consumer of the American gun, they tend to think very much of the cowboy or the pioneer, or at least the US government. But as the gun industry matured in the 1800s, by far it was staying alive through its international contracts. So you would be hard pressed by the 1870s to find any place on the map that wasn't armed by the gun breadbasket to the world, which is really Connecticut Valley as well as upstate New York or Remington was stationed.

The Winchester operation stayed in business in the 1860s by arming in the Benito Juarez forces and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Remington armed much of Western Europe at this time. Samuel Colt had huge contracts with the Russian Tsar. So in one respect the American gun industry and even its gun culture was very much a global international phenomenon in these years, and the big consumers, the big markets were actually regimes and states and revolutionaries elsewhere.

Annabelle Quince: If so many guns were being shipped offshore, was there a civilian demand for guns in America before and after the civil war?

Brian DeLay: Yes, this is in fact a very contentious question among historians, and I think that the answer to that question can only be posed in a comparative sense, compared to other countries, and I think certainly compared to other countries there was a very robust demand in the United States, a robust domestic market for firearms in the United States.

The United States is a country that is transforming dramatically in the course of the 19th century, it's expanding rapidly, people are moving into new regions and displacing the people that they find there. And of course a very significant component of the US economy depended upon slavery. And slavery doesn't work absent systemic violence. The highest percentage of gun ownership in the country is in the south. So, yes, the United States had a pretty robust arms demand domestically prior to the civil war. But that really begins to increase dramatically after the civil war.

Annabelle Quince: The American civil war, like all conflicts, was a period of opportunity for gun manufacturers, as millions of soldiers on both sides had to be armed.

Brian DeLay: The problem of course for the gun manufacturers is that wars end, and then all of a sudden you're left with all this idled capacity. And so consequently there are a number of major arms manufacturers in the United States that fail once the US Civil War ends, and those who survive generally survive by doing two things; one, by pursuing foreign arms contracts which some arms makers do with considerable success, so Remington and Winchester and Colt, for example, are all very successful in obtaining foreign arms contracts in places like the Ottoman Empire and South American republics, in Asia and also in Europe.

But then the other way that arms makers find to survive and prosper in the post-war period is by helping to create more and more domestic demand. And that's really the beginning or a qualitative shift in the level of sophistication of the advertising campaigns that arms manufacturers deploy and in the sophisticated reach of the market around the country. So the ones who survive the war generally are the ones who are able to either gets those external contracts or latch their arms manufacturing to the brutal romance of the American West.

Pamela Haag: By the 1880s and the 1890s, by the turn of the century, as other countries possess the kind of technology that these companies once possessed alone and as the wars calmed down and there was less demand for the major military contracts, Winchester and some of the other major manufacturers really did turn their attention to keeping the market alive in the United States and developing that domestic civilian market which earlier had been kind of secondary. So it's almost at the moment when the frontier closes and the country is transitioning into a more modern post-frontier state that the American gun industry starts thinking, well, how do we cultivate more demand for our product at home? How do we maintain interest at a time when theoretically Americans might have had much less need for a gun? You know, it was a much more modern, urban country by the 1900s. So on paper this should have been really bad news for the gun industry, yet it thrived at that moment.

Annabelle Quince: You're on RN with me, Annabelle Quince, and this is Rear Vision.

The first half of the 20th century was dominated by wars and conflict, which inevitably led to opportunities for the American gun industry.

Brian DeLay: World War I, there's an enormous ramping up of productive capacity, not only among arms makers but of makers of heavy artillery, of course of military aircraft, of munitions of various kinds, gunpowder, ammunition, just a staggering increase in capacity. World War II of course is the same but only far more so, and then you have Korea and you have the Vietnam War and you have the first Iraqi war and the second Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, and dozens of smaller wars all over the world as the United States exits World War II as the great global superpower, with military bases sprung all over the world and military investments in every continent.

And this process is absolutely essential for the prosperity and the growth of American arms manufacturers, and that's really one of the things I think is most important that too few people in the United States realise. The arms business in this country often wraps itself in the idea that government is the enemy, and nothing could be further from the truth. Government has always been the historic patron of the US arms industry and it is absolutely intimately connected to US militarism and war-making around the world.

Annabelle Quince: So, explain that. How is it that the government is involved? What do they do that actually helps to prop up or support the arms industry?

Brian DeLay: As in the early 19th century, in the 20th century only far more so, the American government and the taxpayers that fund the American government deliver huge contracts to private arms manufacturers in order to supply the military, in order to supply dozens of agencies of the federal government, and in order to supply a host of government agencies at the state level, the county level, cities, towns, even universities. And so there are any number of public entities in this country that are steadily and always have been steadily buying arms from arms manufacturers.

So it's difficult to really know exactly what the percentages are, but a relatively recent study found that in 2012 that roughly 40% of gun maker revenue was generated by a public contracts. So even in a country where there is a mind-bogglingly large private market for firearms as there is in this country right now, these manufacturers on average still are very significantly dependent upon government contracts for a significant part of their business.

Annabelle Quince: The private market for guns in America also began to increase in the later part of the 20th century. Tom Diaz is the author of Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America.

Tom Diaz: Up through the early 1970s, the gun industry was integral to American culture but it was like a hardware store industry. It provided utilitarian firearms, primarily for hunting, also for recreational use and marksmanship, and to some extent for self-defence. That said however, up until the mid-1970s, the United States model with respect to regulation of firearms was sort of normal. Nobody thought gun control was controversial. It varied from region to region but many states and localities had regulations and gun laws. The industry itself was really pedestrian. It provided standard model rifles, handguns, shotguns, and they were for purposes that we would probably today regard as relatively benign.

But by the early 1980s to the mid-1980s the gun industry was in serious trouble, and here's why. A firearm is essentially an indestructible consumer product, as compared to, say, a cell phone or even a refrigerator. If it's properly maintained, I could get a firearm that was manufactured and sold in the 18th century, and assuming that it's been well maintained it still does exactly the same job. So the gun industry came to realise that its markets were saturated. People had about as many guns as they thought they needed because if you buy a handgun, let's say, let's say you're one of these people who believe you need a gun for home defence, how many do you need? Well, you only need one. And so it's kind of hard to sell that person a second gun.

Along in this period, the '60s, early '70s, comes a gentleman by the name of William Ruger, who created a company, today it is one of the largest manufacturers of handguns in the United States. And Bill Ruger said in several public interviews; we have a little money-making machine here, we just need to make new things. We need new designs and we need to convince people that the gun you bought last year, just like the car you bought last year, we've changed the design so much, you need this new one. That was Bill Ruger's intellectual contribution.

Now, in the mid-1980s there were two companies, an Italian company and an Austrian company, that revolutionised the handgun market in the United States and essentially saved the gun industry.

[Gun advertisement]

The army comes along with a new contract. The Italian company Beretta enters the competition, and they actually win it with a new semiautomatic pistol, and it's what is known as a high-capacity semiautomatic pistol, meaning that in a single loading the magazine or box of ammunition you put in, you could put in a lot more rounds of ammunition than you could in the old Colt, the magazine capacity was seven rounds, now you can get magazines with 11 and 14, even 19 rounds of ammunition. So it's a significant increase in the firepower of handguns.

[Gun advertisement]

At the same time, roughly the same time, an Austrian company named Glock, which had never manufactured guns before, they made door locks, suddenly discovered, wow, there's a market in the United States for guns and we are going to make them. I think they also had a European competition. So Glock also designed a high-capacity semiautomatic pistol.

Beretta had already got the American military market, so Glock aimed at the American law enforcement market. Up until that time, American police forces didn't want anything to do with semiautomatic pistols. Glock successfully approached the American law enforcement market and began to sell large quantities of their high-capacity semiautomatic pistols.

Later, executives of both of these companies—the Italian Beretta and the Austrian Glock—said in interviews with financial publications; we knew that selling to the military (or in the case of Glock selling to law enforcement) would not do a lot for our profit margins. However, we understood that there was an enormous market in all the revolver owners in the United States. So our task was to convince them that old-fashioned six-round revolver that you've got is useless. What you need is our new high-capacity semiautomatic pistol with the high-capacity magazines. And that took off.

By the end of the 1980s virtually every law enforcement force in America had converted to high-capacity semiautomatic pistols. And civilians now began to buy these in large quantities. So that rejuvenated, revived the American gun market

Brian DeLay: There is absolutely a connection between the arms that are used by police forces and military on the one hand and the arms that are coveted by private buyers. So as gun technology changes over the course of the later 20th century, as individual gun manufacturers are competing in this very aggressive marketplace for lucrative contracts, they innovate, and they innovate in ways that are initially seen as giving military and police forces an edge, but then those innovations quickly find their way into the civilian market. So, high-capacity magazines is one example.

And I live in a very liberal part of the country, but even my local grocery store, if I go to the magazine rack, maybe as much as an eighth of the magazines on that rack or a tenth of the magazines on that rack are gun aficionado magazines. And very often what they are advertising and fetishising our military style guns, guns that look like they would be used by military personnel, and there is an allure there that is absolutely a part of the American gun culture.

Journalist [archival]: He says he has trained 20,000 clients since starting his business, Tactical Response, in 1996.

American Tactical Response Trainer [archival]: In 2008, '09 and '10 I had 25% increases, 2011 I had a 50% increase.

Journalist [archival]: Why?

American Tactical Response Trainer [archival]: People are just in general more afraid than they were 10 years ago.

Journalist [archival]: Afraid of what?

American Tactical Response Trainer [archival]: I can't really put my finger on it. Like we have couples that show up and I'll walk over to them while they are loading their magazines and I'll say, 'Why are you here?' They'll say, 'Well, we bought these guns and we didn't know how to use them, and we bought some food at the house and we've got some medical supplies because we think things are going to get bad in this country.'

Brian DeLay: Something very important happened just in the last decade or 13, 14 years in this country. Private arm sales just exploded after 2005 or really with the advent of Barack Obama as president. And the gun lobby, led most especially by the National Rifle Association, was phenomenally successful in creating an illusion. Again, it's this illusion that government is the enemy, that what we have is we have these gun manufacturers who are trying to simply satisfy the needs and the desires of freedom-loving Americans and the government is threatening to come and somehow get in between them and to stop them.

And this fear based campaign, and that's really what it was, it helped convince millions of Americans in a time of declining crime that they were surrounded by danger and that the only way that they could be safe, and maybe more importantly psychically, the only way that they can keep their family safe, the only way they can keep their children safe, the only way they can keep their community safe is to become not simply a gun owner but a person who is always armed and is always ready and is ever a loan for threats.

Annabelle Quince: In 2016, journalist Josh Harkinson was working for the magazine Mother Jones, and wrote an article on Americans largest gun manufacturers, 'Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America's 10 Biggest Gunmakers'.

Josh Harkinson: Together the 10 companies that we investigated produce more than 8 million firearms per year for buyers in the United States, accounting for more than two-thirds of the total market, and this market is worth about $8 billion a year.

Marcus Luttrell [archival]: I know you're watching, so pay attention. You hate my freedom, my religion and my country, and I will never, never surrender my rights to your terror. I'll say what I think, worship according to my beliefs and raise my children how I see fit, and I defend it all with the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. I cower to no one because I am the National Rifle Association of America and I am freedom's safest place.

Josh Harkinson: The NRA is very forceful in advocating for the right to bear arms, and they define that right very broadly. So it's one thing to own a gun, it's another thing to own a Barrett .50 calibre sniper rifle that can shoot down a helicopter. And the NRA basically believes that any gun is a gun that anybody in public should be able to have. It polices not only Washington but the gun industry itself. So in the past when some gun makers like Smith & Wesson for example have attempted to compromise with political forces, with the administration, at the time it was the Clinton administration, and put in place some reasonable controls on preventing sales to criminals, for example, the NRA has targeted them for boycotts. So I think not only are politicians afraid of the NRA but gun companies are afraid of them.

Student [archival]: And the fact that we can't go to school and feel safe every day when we are supposed to feel safe is a problem. And the fact that our senators are sacrificing us for NRA money is a problem. Congress has one job and that's to make laws, so make some law.

Tom Diaz: What will change the United States is the United States' changing demographic. The strongest support for unbridled firearms ownership and sale is a certain demographic and they are mostly older white men. If you look at what's happening in the United States however, you have a growing youth demographic, we have a large immigrant community and we have a growing diversity and ethnicity. All of these three communities and these so-called Parkland kids do not buy into the traditional American gun culture. So the optimistic side of me says this is going to be…it's not going to be a week-long story but they are going to be organising and they are going to inspire organisation, and I'm hopeful, but it's an open question, it's not going to be an overnight thing.

Brian DeLay: Roughly 5% of American gun owners belong to the National Rifle Association. People own guns for a wide variety of reasons, and I myself grew up in a household with many guns. My dad is a hunter and a gun collector and it's an extremely common thing in this country. But I really do believe that this status quo can change and will change. I thought this even before the massacre in Florida and the emergence of these incredible young people who have galvanised the country to try to take courage and bind together and help pass the meaningful firearms safety legislation. It is not going to happen with our current Congress, it's not going to happen with the current configuration of political power in Florida, but I do believe that it is possible that their failure to do anything in the aftermath of these horrible massacres will produce political change. And once that happens, then some meaningful changes are entirely possible.

Annabelle Quince: Tom Diaz, author of Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America. You also heard from Brian DeLay, Associate Professor of History at the University of California in Berkeley; Pamela Haag, author of The Gunning of America; and freelance journalist Josh Harkinson.

The sound engineer is Judy Rapley. I'm Annabelle Quince, and this is Rear Vision on RN.

Guests

Pamela Haag

Author/historian and author The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture.

Brian DeLay

Associate Professor of History at the University of California in Berkeley.

Tom Diaz

Gun control activist and author of Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America.

Josh Harkinson

Freeland journalist and author of the Mother Jones article from 2016, Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America’s 10 Biggest Gunmakers.